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Marketed as a dialogue with Jeremy Allen White, and offering “a special guest”, there was very little surprise when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the intimate platform at Spotify’s London offices on Tuesday evening. The performer and the rock star came out separately, but to the same clip of introductory track: the starting verses of Atlantic City, from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.

It is, after all, the production of this LP that serves as the centerpiece for Scott Cooper’s new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts White as Springsteen at a pivotal point in the singer’s life and career. Much of the evening’s conversation, steered by Edith Bowman, focused on the complex method of embodying Springsteen, and the inescapable oddity of fiction intersecting with reality.

Springsteen – throughout, a portrait of serene calm – mentioned first catching a glimpse of White during a audio test at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 2024. “Jeremy was clad in white, so he was simple to notice,” he recalled. “I just kind of waved him to the stage and we said hi.” White was already thoroughly versed in Springsteen’s music, had viewed extensive footage of concert material, and read a glut interviews and biographies. The Wembley show was an occasion for a deeper insight of Springsteen as a concert act, and to discuss some of the specifics of the Nebraska period with the singer himself. Springsteen remembered preparing himself for an interrogation that never arrived: “I thought this guy is really gonna be interested in me …” he said. In the end, however, “Jeremy was so well-read, he really asked scarcely any inquiries.”

It was an challenging character to take on, White said. He mentioned often to the sheer weight of Springsteen information available, the amount of learning he had to absorb, and spoke of “the strain I was putting on myself. Bruce called it ‘focus’. I called it ‘nervousness that solidified, maybe, into focus.’”

“A lot of focus was going into the musical component of the film” … Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere.

For all the research he undertook, it was through the tunes that he really connected to the part. “A lot of my concentration was going into the musical component of the film,” he said. “[Scott] asked me to vocalize and handle the guitar, and I said, ‘I am not skilled in those things … are you sure?’” Cooper was insistent. White promptly recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s songs. “I remember being in Nashville, at RCA [studio], in the recording space, singing Nebraska, and building self-belief … feeling close to Bruce, in a way,” he said. “When you’re reading a great script, your job is very easy,” he said. “And when you’re reading Bruce’s lyrics, it’s the same. Everything’s right there.”

Springsteen also gave White a 1955 Gibson J-200 – the most similar he could find to the guitar used for Nebraska, and “just about the finest guitar you can start with,” White says. He commenced guitar lessons, via Zoom, with session player JD Simo. “Hey, I’m so thrilled to learn guitar with you,” White noted expressing on their first meeting. “We lack the time to learn the guitar,” Simo replied. “We have time to learn these five Bruce songs.”

Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen on the set of Deliver Me From Nowhere in 2024.

Springsteen’s own feelings about the film were originally simpler. “I reasoned I’m 76 years old, I am not overly concerned what the fuck I do any more,” he said. “Yeah, go ahead. At my age you take more risks, in your work and in your life in general.” It aided that Cooper was “a true blue-collar film-maker” making “the kind of film I would be interested in,” he said. “Not your conventional musical biopic, but more of a personality-focused story with music.”

As the project moved forward, it maybe became stranger. Springsteen visited the set often, expressing regret to White each time he showed up. “It’s gotta be really odd with the guy’s foolish self standing there,” he said. But he appreciated what he saw: “I’ve stated this earlier, but I kept thinking ‘Damn, when did I get that good-looking?’” In the seat beside him, White shakes his head and shakes his head.

Springsteen had little uncertainty about White’s choice; he understood that the actor was ready to depict the most reflective time in his recording career. “I’d watched The Bear, and how the camera followed his personal thoughts,” he said. “And if you see him in a film, it’s a common saying, but he’s a music icon.”

When he first saw White acting as him, he was impressed by the actor’s method. “His performance was totally from the core personality, not just choosing characteristics and adopting them superficially,” he said. “It’s a original performance, but in some way it strongly connects to my story and myself.” He viewed it as something like his own approach to songwriting – to writing about people whose lives differ so greatly from his own. “You have to find the part of them that is part of you.”

More disconcerting was the way the film pushed him to reexamine difficult periods in his own life. The rebuilding of his grandparents’ home in Freehold, New Jersey – a house he once described as “the greatest and saddest sanctuary I’ve ever known” was eerie; Springsteen described how often he saw the home in his dreams. “So, to be in that house again … it was remarkable, and extremely moving.”

Similarly, it was “a very powerful thing” to see Stephen Graham as his father – depicting his unpredictable early years, when he suffered unidentified mental health issues and had a drinking problem, and the vulnerability and kindness of his later years.

Springsteen told of watching an early viewing in the presence of his sister, who held his hand throughout. Just a year younger than her brother, “she retained every memory”. At the end, she looked at him and said: “Isn’t it wonderful that we have that?”

There was an parallel, possibly, of the sensation Springsteen hopes to give his own audiences through his live shows. “You establish an utopian space for three hours,” he informed the intimate audience before him last night. “It’s not a fictional universe. It’s a very plausible world. It has all the wonderful and terrible parts of life … But hopefully there’s an element of uplift that my audience takes with them. And ideally it remains with them for as long as they need it.”